Song of the Week: 'Written in the Stars,' Tinie Tempah feat. Eric Turner

On "Written in the Stars," Tinie Tempah calls himself "young gun fully black Barack." There are many ways to take that line, and I don't think I like any of them.

Early rap-rock hybrids were pretty rowdy stuff. For many years after Run-DMC’s "Rock Box," it was a given that if an emcee was going to spit over a live band, that band was going to play metal or something close to it. This was not unreasonable. Rap music is aggressive, and so is heavy metal. It seemed like a natural fit.

Yet it did not always work. For every success story such as Jay-Z’s "99 Problems," there were 20 other singles on which the rapper’s approach did not quite fit with metal accompaniment. Hip-hop tends to be self-congratulatory and celebratory: As dark as its storytelling can get, it is fundamentally optimistic music. Like heavy metal, it can be glowering. But it makes an entirely different threat.

Around the time of Eminem’s 2000 hit "Stan," a few producers developed an inkling that emcees might sound better rapping over slick arena pop-rock. The strategy: get a pure-voiced singer to handle an aching, dramatic, minor-key chorus saturated with synthesized strings, and confine the rapper to the verses. This didn’t seem like a natural fit at all and, to be fair, it took a little while to catch on. But last summer, Atlanta rapper and instrumentalist B.o.B released an entire chart-topping album of it, and threw open the floodgates.

Consider the case of Tinie Tempah, an emcee who never had a hit in America before this spring. Tinie is considered a practitioner of grime — a brutal British subgenre of hip-hop that has never made many commercial inroads on these shores. Most Americans do not know what grime is, and they certainly will not develop a clearer idea after hearing "Written in the Stars." They’re more likely to mistake the song for a new B.o.B single.

Like B.o.B’s "Airplanes" and "Don’t Let Me Fall," "Written in the Stars" is a song about the obstacles the emcee has overcome to make it in the music industry. The narrator hasn’t just beaten poverty and his bad hand, but has dispelled the politics of the business through the force of his talent. He’s triumphed over adversity and he’s taking a victory lap, right there on your radio. You’re invited to cheer, and take advice that could have been pulled from a management-training chapter on the value of persistence: "Everyone’s a kid that no one cares about/You just have to keep screaming until they hear you out."

This wouldn’t match with metal, or the breakneck electro rhythms of U.K. grime. "Written in the Stars" needed something uplifting, and found it in Eric Turner, a singer pompous enough to match Tinie Tempah’s sentiment. Turner has supplied a chorus redolent of the cinematic sweep of Coldplay (possibly the biggest influence on this modern rap-rock boomlet) and sung it in a gasping tenor. It’s effective, and the song is rocketing toward the top of the American charts. But it is even less playful than Eminem’s "Love the Way You Lie," which is hard to do. Where B.o.B undercut the angst of "Airplanes" with his geeky charm, "Written in the Stars" is pure bombast.

It was inevitable that B.o.B’s success would spawn imitators. It’s a simple formula, and there is no shortage of aspiring arena-rock bands with vainglorious choruses to peddle. But while the new rap-rock is keeping emcees on the charts, I am not sure that it is a healthy development for hip-hop artists. On "Written in the Stars," Tempah rhymes two brief verses and Turner sings his chorus four times. That’s awfully unfavorable arithmetic for an emcee who insists that he’s desperate to be heard.